Archive Rooms

The Archive Rooms were made and presented to seek the donating families’ permission to use all the donated items in future works. In order to do so, all of the actual donations were utilised. They were presented as a platform for family engagement and feedback as works in progress – they were not presented as “finished” pieces. They became sites for conversations about loss and reflections. These rooms manifest in different forms and contexts, but will always be drawn from the donated objects. Each deceased person is allocated the same space regardless of the volume of their donations and each room can be viewed as a separate work. An audio extract from the narrative recorded at the original interviews around their kitchen tables, played quietly in the background in each archive room. All families were given a typed transcript of the these interviews. They were asked to take the transcript home and discuss it thoroughly with their extended families and to feel free to amend the transcript, delete anything that they did not want to go into the public domain, and return the edited version. Any deletions would be applied to the audio works before public viewing.